Introducing the 2020 PLL Entry Draft Player Pool

The 2020 Entry Draft player pool is set.

The league has confirmed the entry of 16 pro lacrosse players for the league’s first Entry Draft on Monday, March 16. Of the 16 players, 14 of them will be selected over the course of a two-round draft that has the Waterdogs selecting first overall followed by the Chrome, Atlas, Archers, Whipsnakes, Redwoods, and Chaos.

The player pool consists of six defensemen: Jesse Bernhardt, Ryland Rees (LSM), Eli Gobrecht, Finn Sullivan, Craig Chick (LSM), and Jason Noble. There are also three short-stick defensive midfielders (SSDM) in TJ Comizio, Josh Hawkins, and Donny Moss; four midfielders in Zach Currier, Zed Williams, Brendan Kavanagh, and Christian Mazzone; goalie Dillon Ward, face-off specialist Greg Puskuldjian, and attackman Rob Pannell.

Where do each of these guys fit best in 2020, and who should your team be targeting in Monday’s Entry Draft?

Let’s start with attackman Rob Pannell, the biggest name to make the switch from Major League Lacrosse (MLL) to the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL). Pannell won Ivy League Player of the Year three times while at Cornell University, winning the 2013 Tewaaraton Award. He has spent the past seven seasons in the MLL with the New York Lizards, scoring almost 250 goals and 450 points. The 2018 MLL league MVP and two-time Offensive Player of the Year has played in 14 international tournament games for Team USA. In the 2018 FIL World Championship in Israel, Pannell scored 27 goals and had 26 assists, including the assist on Tom Schreiber’s game-winning goal in the win over Team Canada for the Gold medal.

It really doesn’t matter who takes Pannell because he will fit into and produce for whatever offense he joins in 2020. He played with Chrome’s Jordan Wolfe, another ball-dominant X-attackman, on Team USA in 2018 and had no issue, and although Pannell looks to be the best fit on the Archers or Atlas, two teams that lack a true X-attackman, he is heavily favored to be the first selection to the Waterdogs.

Versatile midfielders dominated the PLL in 2019, and two-way middie Zach Currier could be in for a career season in 2020. He graduated from Princeton in 2017 after scoring 55 goals, tallying 69 assists, scooping 302 ground balls, causing 55 turnovers, and securing back-to-back First Team All-Ivy selections. He continued that production into the pros, where he scored 36 points in 13 games in 2019 for the Denver Outlaws. An MLL All-Star and one of three finalists for league MVP in 2019, Currier could benefit greatly from playing in unsettled situations, where most of the league’s offensive production came from in 2019. He should go off the board within the first few selections of the draft.

Zed Williams and Brendan Kavanagh are two other offensive players that put there name’s on the 2020 Entry Draft roster. Williams played attack and midfield for Virginia, where he scored 69 goals and 47 assists before graduating in 2017. He was drafted in the third round by the Rochester Rattlers and in 16 games in 2019, he scored 36 goals and tallied 12 assists while playing on the Boston Cannons top midfield line. Kavanagh, the younger brother of Redwood’s attackman Matt Kavanagh, was a First Team All-CAA selection as a junior at Hofstra University. He scored 75 career points before graduating in 2018, and after being drafted by the Denver Outlaws in the 2018 Supplemental Draft, he transitioned from midfield to attack, scoring 37 points and being named an MLL All-Star.

Ryland Reese is the top LSM in this draft. A Stony Brook University graduate in 2019, he played in 17 games for the Boston Cannons last season and recorded 69 ground balls and caused 15 turnovers on his way to an MLL All-Star game selection. On the offensive end, he scored six goals, two of which were 2-point goals, and is in position to become one of the league’s top long-stick midfielders. The other LSM in this draft is Lehigh’s Craig Chick, who had an NCAA record 160 caused turnovers and 224 ground balls in his college career. A first-round selection by the Dallas Rattlers in 2019, he was one of two defensemen to play in every game for the Rattlers, causing 20 turnovers and recording 48 ground balls.

Jesse Bernhardt has been one of the best defensemen in pro lacrosse over the last decade. After a phenomenal college career at Maryland, where he was a two-time captain and 2012 ACC Co-Defensive Player of the Year, he was drafted fourth overall by the Chesapeake Bayhawks in 2013. In 14 games last season, he totaled 31 ground balls and 19 caused turnovers to help the Bayhawks win the 2019 MLL Championship. A two-time Team USA medalist, Bernhardt was a captain for Team USA’s Gold medal squad in the 2018 FIL World Championship and is one of the top poles for Monday’s Entry Draft.

Former Denver Outlaws defensemen Eli Gobrecht and Finn Sullivan will also be available on Monday night. Gobrecht graduated from Ithaca in 2018 and was selected in the 7th round of the 2018 MLL Supplemental Draft. The 2016 Division III Defensive Player of the Year helped the Outlaws win the MLL Championship in 2018 by causing 14 turnovers, which ranked 4th in the league. Finn Sullivan graduated from Hofstra in 2017, and he was drafted in the 5th round of the 2017 MLL Supplemental Draft. At Hofstra, he averaged 15 caused turnovers between his sophomore and senior season and recorded 112 career ground balls. A 2019 MLL Defensive Player of the Year finalist, Sullivan has started in every game that he has dressed for, logging 95 career ground balls. In his only matchup with Rob Pannell in 2019, Sullivan held Pannell to two points.

Rounding out the defensemen we have Jason Noble. A three-time All American, Noble graduated from Cornell in 2013 after back-to-back First Team All-Ivy selections as a junior and senior. In his college career, he recorded over 200 ground balls and 100 caused turnovers, and he is a two-time member of Team Canada, winning a Gold medal in 2014 and a Silver medal in 2018. Noble has only played in 36 MLL games, but he has over 89 career ground balls, and in over 100 NLL games played he has recorded over 400 loose balls.

This draft will also include three SSDM’s that hope to take advantage of the PLL’s shortened field. After a very successful career at Villanova, where he caused 61 turnovers and had 172 ground balls in 60 games, TJ Comizio recorded 43 ground balls, caused 9 turnovers, and contributed offensively with six goals and eight assists in his rookie season with the Atlanta Blaze. Josh Hawkins, who won the NCAA National Championship in 2012 with Loyola and graduated in 2013 as one of the nation’s best defensive midfielders, and Donny Moss, a veteran defensive midfielder out of Adelphi University with over 10 years of pro lacrosse experience, are also available as SSDM’s. Hawkins retired in 2018 and is joining the PLL after a season off.

Dillon Ward is the only goalie in the Entry Draft player pool. Ward was the starter for the 2018 MLL Champion Denver Outlaws and was one of three finalists for Goalie of the Year in 2019. A two-time All-World goalie, he won a Gold medal in 2014 with Team Canada and was named tournament MVP, and he has been widely considered one of the best goalies in the NLL since being drafted by the Colorado Mammoth in 2013.

Our only face-off specialist is Adelphi University’s Greg Puskuldjian. Puskuldjian won 68% of his faceoffs as a senior in 2014, scoring seven goals and adding three assists. In his pro lacrosse career, he’s played for the Ohio Machine and the New York Lizards, and throughout his MLL career, he’s won 50% of his faceoffs and has over 400 career ground balls.

The final player on the PLL Entry Draft player pool is former Rutgers midfielder Christian Mazzone. Mazzone started his college career as a short-stick defensive midfielder, where he caused 37 turnovers and recorded 136 ground balls, and eventually transitioned to the offense and scored 29 goals in his senior season. As a rookie in 2019 with the Atlanta Blaze, he scored 33 goals while shooting 50% and adding 40 ground balls.

With 14 new pro lacrosse players to join the league on Monday night, the PLL talent is only going to get better. Stay tuned for future news by following us on Instagram and Twitter, @TopShelfLax_, and subscribing to our podcast, Behind the Back, which can be found on Apple Podcast, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Audioboom. We will have a full Entry Draft Mock Draft in a special episode of Behind the Back on Monday morning, March 16, ahead of the league’s first Entry Draft.